Watch the Birth of a Jack Daniels Barrel

Every bottle of Jack Daniels once sat in a barrel made at the Brown-Forman Cooperage in Louisville, Kentucky, where this video was shot. We tend to assume that every part of the large-scale food chain is mechanized at this point, but Brown-Forman still has real guys with real hammers knocking hoops onto barrel staves. Wisely, though, they leave the work of charring barrels with a huge blast of flame to the machines.

If you’re of a certain vintage of nerd, this video might bring back memories of a certain barrel-centric scene in the 1977 animated Hobbit movie. It would be cruel to leave such a nostalgic itch unscratched, so we dug up that video, too: